Parents, I feel your pain.
Yes, we now live in a surveillance society.
Just when we thought we could be as emotionally and physically abusive as we wanted to be in the safety of our own homes,
the Internet shows up and ruins all the fun.
Dammit!

Take as an example Judge William Adams.
He’s a judge in family court and gets to decide when a person is fit to be a parent.
And like all reasonable people, he liked to come home and beat his daughter into submission.
No biggie.
Until, that is, his daughter caught it on tape and shared it on the internet.
Damn you Prying Eyes of Accountability!

Or what about Freemon Everett Seay who like everyone else liked to hack away at his daughter
with a wooden sword for hours?
That’s just good ol’ fashioned parenting right there.
But when his daughter took pictures of her injuries and posted them to the internet,
here comes other people with their ‘laws, common sense, decency, humanity, and love.’

Wasn’t the world much easier when parents could hide behind four walls and abuse their children in private?
If this pattern continues, soon we’ll see people video taping police officers to hold them accountable too!

Something I learned today about the oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico from BP’s blown-out well got me thinking about all the oil that didn’t get away, the oil that BP and the other companies have managed to pump and sell over the past century or so, without “wasting” much through spillage.

What I learned from TV news this evening was that one reason BP has sought to downplay the amount of the Deepwater spill is that the company will likely have to pay agreed-upon royalty fees to the government for every gallon sucked out of the earth, including all the gallons spilled into the Gulf. Of course, when BP signed that contract, it was planning to harvest all the oil, not let millions of gallons of it float away.

And what about the oil that gets pumped up properly, refined, delivered to gas stations and power plants and heating oil companies, and eventually sold to us customers. What do we do with it? We burn it, of course (except for the portion we use to make plastic). Some small amount of residue from the burning gunks up our cars’ engines and catalytic converters and slimes up the surface of our roads, but modern cars burn fuel pretty efficiently; the vast majority of what was gasoline when we paid for it goes out the tail pipe and into the air. You can see the oil in the air in this picture, which shows the view from the Wasatch Mountains of Utah, looking westward toward Salt Lake City. The exhaust from a few hundred thousand cars has become thick smog, completely hiding the city.

The twentieth century was the age of oil; Saudi Arabia’s wealth was discovered in 1900. By approximately 2000, we’d burned up half of all the oil believed to exist, including almost all the oil in Texas and Oklahoma and most of the oil in Alaska. Much of that century’s worth of oil smoke is still in the air, doing its greenhouse-gas thing, but much has fallen back to earth by now, often washed out by rain and snow. We say that a rain shower has “cleared the air,” and it has. Back on the ground, the chemicals that perhaps recently floated in the air as smog and once upon a time rested deep underground as oil now leach down through the soil into our groundwater or wash directly into creeks and lakes and rivers and of course oceans. Either way, we drink that oil. And it’s nasty–carcinogenic and flat-out poisonous.

All day every day, we drink oil and breathe it; after a century of oil-burning, we and all the other plants and animals on the planet probably have traces of oil in every cell in our bodies. A century is a very short time, evolution-wise; homo sapiens evolved in a world where almost all the oil was trapped deep underground, and hardly any of it was in the air and the water and the food chain.

We’ve been able to eat and drink and breathe oil and still get by, so to speak, because most of the time the burnt-up oil is diluted before we ingest it. The life in the Gulf of Mexico won’t be so lucky.

On Christmas Eve I found myself camping next to the Golden Gate Bridge. It was pleasantly warm, views magnificent, whiskey flowing, waves undulating, conversations predictable. Around midnight, on schedule like a European train, I spotted Santa soaring over the bay towards San Francisco! My companions were all rubber-stamped hippies with their medicinal medical pot papers and one of them had a gun. He aimed it at Santa and pulled the trigger, trimming Santa’s beard with no harm done. As he aimed again and I tackled this hippy and stuck his trigger-finger in the fire, scalding it to a stump. This was a story of how a Jew saved Christmas.

Detroit–This week, Panty Raid bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab breathed new life into a city long thought dead. The suspect enroute from the international house of pannekoeken, Amsterdam, sought to explode his “[genitals] so hot baby” but his attempt’s failure is being credited on his oversight to powder down his schwetty kibbles and bits.

The Nigerian Abdullmutallab’s stay in a strange and myterious land called “Yemen” has rankled the ire of Senator Joe Lieberman and millions of other droopy faced Americans.

“If I knew on what continent this supposed country was, assuming it is a real country and not a Narnia-eque playland of the imagination, I would bomb it myself.” Said Detroit’s Bethlehem Baptist Pastor Steve Utnam on Christmas Day.

Millions of Americans have been quizzically scouring over Google maps trying to locate the word ‘Yemen’ only to end up being distracted by smell of burning Pop Tarts from the other room. Google reports that searches for “Bomb the Forest Moon of Yemen”, “Tora Tora Tora Yemen”, “Blow Sum Shit Up Unquestioningly Yemen” quadrupled since the attempted Panty Raid.

Independent Senator from Connecticut Joe Lieberman said speaking with War Marketing Officials at Fox News, “Iraq was yesterday’s war, Afghanistan is today’s war. If we don’t act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow’s war…..The Iraq war is over. Boring. Been there, done that. Afghanistan is totally hot right now. Afghanistan is to heroin production and chaos what Amy Winehouse is to heroin comsumption and chaos. If we don’t wage an immediate illegal war with Yemen, we will have to wage a postponed illegal war against Yemen.”

“Any country remotely associated with a person who is black, Muslim, and tries something murderous, involving their panties or not, should be pre-emptively bombed, razed, and then occupied for a decade.” Said Tammy Sharms, a mother of eight from St. Louis, MO. “So long as that country is poor, under the control of warlords or despots, and has oil.” Mrs. Sharms was quick to point out “Saudia Arabia is not poor.”

America holds its breath to see whether America will ‘snikt’ its ferocious and berzerker military might on Iran or move on to the greener pastures of Yemen. Either way, Americans are hopeful that by next Christmas they will have more loved ones serving in some war somewhere.

There are plenty of reasons to shake one’s head at the imperial/colonial forces of American military madness. Our nation’s greed and widespread acceptance that the rest of the world suffer to prop up our culture of corporate plutocracy has so far led to our bullying the world.

Of course like anything whose precepts, means, values, and outcomes are largely negative for our nation the armed forces have tried to employ smooth looking advertisements and propaganda to encourage more recruits.

The newest attempt to bamboozle young people is intended apparently to please Science Fiction fans–“It’s not science fiction. Its what we do everyday.”
But instead they show their hand as playing only to the fantasies of numbed and inconsiderate gamers.

Is this really what the Air Force intended?
Do they really believe that science fiction is all about the gear, tech, guns, dangerous missions and high adventure as these commercials depict?

Its my belief that most folks who enjoy science fiction and most gamers for that matter–understand the prophetic role that science fiction plays in society. It is a genre that is political, ethical, social, and often radically so. Does it take much imagination to see how science fiction has historically been very adept at revealing the insanity of war and violence, encouraging the celebration of diversity, and exploring progressive and intelligent solutions for people?

The American armed forces, including the Air Force have a history where these features are the exception, not the rule. The Air Force by spending so much money on these commercials reveal what they really think of their potential new cadets: they are mindless gamer junkies who want to play out their Call of Duty or Halo fantasies and don’t think about the larger narratives that are being conducted around the ‘exciting violence’.

Gamers of good conscience who love action franchises know the difference between the endless war and continuous action of a fun game and the perpetual war that America is trying to enforce on the world’s poor. They will see right through this condescending tripe.

These commercials are shameful, Air Force. The people who serve our nation’s Armed Forces deserve better and our young people are getting wise to your program of endless war.

I’ve become fascinated with Abimael Guzmán, former leader of a communist rebel group in Perú known at The Shining Path. Here are some details from his life:

His father was a wealthy lottery winner and ladies’ man.

Guzmán’s first career was philosophy professor. He traveled to China and became interested in Maoism and Chinese-style communism.

He went underground in the late 70’s and formed The Shining Path rebel guerrilla group with intentions to lead a peasant revolution. The plan of this group was to terrorize police, army and government officials in order to make it impossible for them to rule, allowing for The Shining Path to take over utilizing Maoist principles.

The Shining Path burned ballot boxes, organized labor strikes and tortured those they deamed against them.

Wikipedia says: “Initially Guzmán attempted to win over the support of citizens by punishing corrupt government officials and other unpopular leaders. However Shining Path’s increasingly brutal methods together with strictly imposed curfews, the prohibition of alcohol and an overall sense of insecurity and fear lead to an increased popular reaction against the communist party.”

He was caught, along with 7 lieutenants, living in a ballet studio in a ritzy neighborhood of Lima. His laptop was found with detailed records of Shining Path members (23.430) and mercenaries, along with a database of his weapons arsenal.

He was publicly exhibited in a cage wearing a black and white striped uniform and was tried by military judges who wore hoods because they feared for their lives. He was sentenced to life and is currently incarcerated in one of four subterranean cells. Ironically, another prisoner in these cells is Vladimiro Montesinos, former head of the National Intelligence Service that captured Guzmán. He is in jail for taking bribes from drug traffickers who secretly videotaped the exchanges.

It is rumored that Guzmán’s first wife was murdered by his mistress and lieutenant, Elena Iparraguirre. Guzmán recently proposed to Iparraguirre, who is serving a life sentence in a different location. The two have not set a date for their wedding.

The Shining Path continues today, although it has morphed into a cocaine cartel.